Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings: Summary & Key Insights

This story began with a false encyclopedia entry, yet it grew into an entire cosmos. I wanted to show how humanity’s hunger for pattern and order can make even falsehoods real. Tlön is an invented planet whose philosophers deny the existence of the physical world, asserting that only ideas are true. Over time, their imagined world infiltrates our own, reshaping language, science, and faith.

When I wrote of Tlön, I meant to ask: what happens when imagination becomes more convincing than fact? A map can begin to dictate the territory; a fiction can supplant life. Our civilization itself is built on invented systems—money, nations, religions—all fictions we collectively believe. In this sense, we are already citizens of Tlön.

In the end, it is not the discovery of a hidden conspiracy that matters, but the revelation that the act of invention itself changes reality. The world, it seems, wishes to become Tlön. And perhaps it always has been.

At first glance, this tale is a spy story: a Chinese agent in World War I must convey a secret message before his capture. Yet beneath its surface lies an infinite labyrinth—the notion that time itself may consist of endless diverging and converging paths.

Yu Tsun’s ancestor, Ts’ui Pên, sought to create both a novel and a maze, but he realized they were one and the same. Each decision creates multiple worlds, each choice another unfolding timeline. As Yu Tsun commits his final act of violence, he understands that within one branch of time he is condemned, and in another, perhaps redeemed.

Through this story I sought to express my lifelong fascination with time as a web rather than a line. Reality is not a single path we walk but an infinite garden where all possibilities coexist. In such a vision, guilt, fate, and meaning take on new dimensions. To live is to choose—and yet every choice has already been made in some other world.